Gamers have been locked out of the network for a week, but the company has revealed that the system has been suspended since it was hacked last Wednesday.

Sony said it discovered that between 17 and 19 April an “illegal and unauthorised person” got access to people’s names, addresses, email address, birthdates, usernames, passwords, logins, security questions and more.

Children with accounts established by their parents also may have had their data exposed, according to Sony, which put the warning on its US PlayStation blog – although the warning about the compromise might not be immediately visible to passing readers [looking at the comments at that Sony link, it looks like Sony waited almost a week to let the users know about the hack – diane]. The company is also emailing people who might be affected.

The intrusion is potentially one of the biggest ever into a store of credit cards. Sony’s PSN is one of the world’s biggest holders of credit cards,

Yeah I remember the day Laci Petersen’s mother made her daughter’s murder completely political. Just to suit herself.

It was clear it would be a gift to the anti women bunch.

Talk about a disgusting mix of absolutely tawdry people, both sides of that marriage. Except for the poor dead woman, who def married the wrong man.

Thy have women over a barrel also, in that it is illegal, at any step of the way to initiate an abortion yourself. There are women sitting in jail in the US who used the drug that apparently is rampant in S and C America to assist in abortion… cannot think of its name, starts with an “m”.

Onward to the past.

As we are led by religious whack jobs and born agains. Luv how I was exhorted to vote for a black born again hack from a slice of Chicago. Or, the big fat choice!, a fucking nut case left over from Vietnam.

well it is very hard to get taken in… frankly. Most places you have to prove independent financial viability, etc.

Or have the ability to live in hotels and engineer periodic re-entry.

I notice we just created a new [fake] layer of money’d immigrant ourselves. A totally bogus plan to OK immigrants attesting they plan to invest a big whopping 100K [that will go along way, right?] and hire [more like promise to hire!] 5 workers.

ugh, just further proof this country generally despises females. That reminds me how incarcerated Cali women (many of whom are incarcerated on bogus prescription painkiller charges), were forced to have problem teeth pulled in order to visit with their kids. And since replacing teeth is such a formidable expense, of course many of them faced impossible odds in obtaining a job when they were released.

yeah, one day soon there’ll likely be Painkiller Police checking each Household (particularly those of single wimmens) for unflushed, old, $paid$ out the ass for, scrips. Of course what can we expect from such a punitive Corp Gov which loves to inflict pain, whether physical or emotional, because that sadistic sense, of the POWER to HARM, is the only way that CorpGov can get it up anymore.

I never dispose of unused scrips, for fear someone may need them later and they won’t be affordable at that time.

Ok, That is it. Kid the younger is not going back to that fucking school. These people are driving me UP A WALL!! I am seriously considering homeschooling him next year….hell, if I don’t have a full-time job, why not? Gotta do something with all of these damned state certifications I’ve got right?!

Oh, and, may I add, that despite any initial misgivings I may have had about my ability to do right by him in homeschool, there is absolutely NO WAY IN HELL that I could do worse than they have done thus far!!

No, I haven’t, because of the very reason that you state. I don’t want to be harrassed about the decision once I make it.

One good thing about Texas is that all I have to do is write a withdrawal letter to the district stating my “intent to homeschool” and then, legally, they can’t touch me, or, more importantly, him!

Of course, my letter will be accompanied by a request for copies of all of his records and the immediate destruction of any kind of documentation with his name and social security number upon. Not that I think that latter will actually happen, but I will put it in writing anyway….

I would LOVE to have the 5300$/year they purportedly spend on my kid, but that won’t happen either! 😉

In Germany you cannot withdraw your child from the Federal system, but as I point ouot to people, that is becasue they intend to preserve it. In at least one instance we hae given official refugee status to people who left Germany, denied withdrawal and home schooling.

I went to kindergarten, first, second and half of third grade in Germany, in German schools….when I got back to the states, I slept through third and fourth grade….

Shit, I did math in fountain pen in first grade!!

No one in Germany would want to withdraw their kids from the federal system, even if they could, because, even though most of their kids are better educated (and bilingual) by the time they get to high school than our kids are in college, they get free post-secondary too!!

I’m almost in denial about having to ask people to do this: sign this petition at change.org to help stop the deportation of Prerna Lal. It’s difficult to think of a more stupid move for the Obama administration to make than to initiate removal proceedings against Prerna. Prerna is arguably the most visible undocumented person, or Dreamer (after the DREAM Act), in the U.S.

As her website will tell you, she helped found dreamactivist.org, one of the most powerful online hubs for migrant youth, she’s a blogger at change.org, and she’s a board member of Immigration Equality. She also earned her Master’s degree in International Relations and is currently studying to get her law degree at George Washington University.

The Obama administration is telling us that they’re focusing their resources on the worst of the worst while folks on the ground know that they’re going after people like Prerna all the time. If you don’t want to read on, please sign this petition to stop Prerna’s deportation.

The political consequences of this for the Obama administration going into the 2012 elections are enormous. While the mainstream media is ignoring it, pro-migrant voters certainly aren’t going to vote for anyone who is deporting away more of our family members, neighbors, peers, and friends than any other President, Democrat or Republican, in history.

While pro-migrant voters shouldn’t be equated with Latino voters, Latinos are easily the largest, most visible, and most organized segment of the pro-migrant electorate. According to a new report from the Pew Hispanic Center a record 14.7 million Latinos stayed home during the midterm elections in 2010. It gets worse. Obama’s approval ratings among Latinos has decreased from 73 to 54 percent. Obama is not going to be able to win Florida and the Southwest with numbers like that.

The Obama administration’s strategy up to this point has been to try and talk about this out of both sides of it’s mouth. The Obama administration tries to brag about it’s skyrocketing enforcement numbers to independents while blaming Republicans for the mess. Pro-migrant voters aren’t stupid. Even 7-year-old Daisy Cuevas understands that it is Obama who is responsible for forcing her to live in terror.

Meanwhile we’re left to try and stop the deportation of our friends, like Prerna Lal, one-by-one. The Obama administration deported almost 400,000 people in 2010 and only granted deferred action to 542 people. Obama deports more people in a day than we’re able to save in a year.

According to a new report from the Pew Hispanic Center a record 14.7 million Latinos stayed home during the midterm elections in 2010. It gets worse. Obama’s approval ratings among Latinos has decreased from 73 to 54 percent. Obama is not going to be able to win Florida and the Southwest with numbers like that.

hmmm i had not read those numbers but he was bound to be in trouble iwth Latinos. Even in 2007 primaries in his home state e could only manage to split the Latino vote with Hilarious. And what has he delivered to thm?

Nothing I can see.

Dream Act, whch, imo, was and is a con, is also a scam. The Dems don’t even discuss it anymore … it was mid term vapor.

And so on. He needs to fully kiss the Gulf states good bye. They did not vote for him last time in terms of winning the overall vote, and now, imo again, the numbers voting agaisnt him or staying home, or whatever, is going to mushroom.

People won’t vote for him if they decide something as simple as “I don’t like him”. And NO ONE is taking a close look at, as in, publicly polling Soc Sec reicpients (who span the income demographics) about no COLA for two years running. The slippy slidey excuse was that the COLA based on 2008 numbers was generous (the high price of fuel and heating oil) but everything has gone way way way up again.

I still make a joke that maybe all Mittens needs to do is sign a paper promising I will make no speeches w/r/t race and religion.

Egypt is planning to open the blockaded border with Gaza and normalizing relations with two of Israel and the West’s Islamist foes.

Right on cue…AS- The context of the current viceroys in Egypt telling their new story? A run-up to…..elections. So, grains of salt all around in these ..deals, these Groping of the Truth Seekers tales…

“Democrats with ties to the Obama White House on Friday are launching a two-pronged fundraising effort aimed at countering deep-pocketed GOP groups in 2012 – and adopting some of the same policies on unlimited, secret donations that President Barack Obama himself has long opposed … The two groups, Priorities USA and Priorities USA Action, aim to raise $100 million to defend Obama’s re-election from an expected onslaught of attack ads from similar Republican outside money organizations activated in the 2010 midterms … The Priorities companion committees will have one that discloses donors – and one that doesn’t, a practice Obama hammered during last year’s election cycle as undermining the democratic process.

The Priorities group also is jettisoning an Obama rule aimed at limiting the influence of special interests by welcoming unlimited contributions from lobbyists, labor unions, corporations, and political action committees – sources that are still banned from giving to the president’s re-election campaign …

Q: I only have a little to give.
Can I still donate to Priorities USA?

A: YES! Through MINOR Priorities USA, you can donaate at the $500 Level.

Q: Wow. That seems alot. Can I give what I have?

A: YES! Through TOTALLY NOT A PRIORITY USA, You can donate lesser amounts.

Q: How about ten bucks?
A: What the fuck~ TEN BUCKS??
Do You WANT Sarah Palin to Win? Good Lord, you simp!
But, if you INSIST,
through NOT EVEN ON THE MAP, USA, we can offer you the privilege of being associated with the campaign, by sending your chicken feed to…

Just got another call from kid the younger’s principal (which of course I let go to voice mail) — she’s got him in the office again and “wanted to share with me why”, so I shoudl call her back.

This is my standard email response to them now:

Dear Ms. Khan:

Thank you for your voice message, the message was forwarded to me. Unfortunately, this is not a convenient time for me to talk on the phone. Please email me and let me know why Quinn has been sent to your office, and what he is doing there.

Thank you, I will look forward to hearing from you.

I don’t expect to hear anything…though I’ll tell you what, yesterday, when papers came home with two other children’s names on them that were dealing with their special ed “Individual Education Plans” and I scanned them and sent an email inquiring as to what should be done with them, it took her less than 30 minutes to return my email!!

You bet your ass, as that is illegal as HELL and if the parent of those two kids knew about it, they’d be able to sue in heartbeat….unfortunately, I do not know either of the parents….

White House officials have banished one of the best political reporters in the country from the approved pool of journalists covering presidential visits to the Bay Area for using now-standard multimedia tools to gather the news.

The Chronicle’s Carla Marinucci — who, like many contemporary reporters, has a phone with video capabilities on her at all times — shot some protesters interrupting an Obama fundraiser at the St. Regis Hotel.

…

The Chron is def reporting the paper was threatened. And WH is “no comment”.

She video’d the 21 singing protesters at the breakfast fundraiser here…

And SF, The Chron and Carla herself are so opposed to this pretzel. Geesh Hardly.

Today, bankers and traders sit at the top of the food chain — the carnivores of the system, devouring everyone and everything below. Near the bottom toils the farmer. For him, the rising price of grain should have been a windfall, but speculation has also created spikes in everything the farmer must buy to grow his grain — from seed to fertilizer to diesel fuel. At the very bottom lies the consumer. The average American, who spends roughly 8 to 12 percent of her weekly paycheck on food, did not immediately feel the crunch of rising costs. But for the roughly 2-billion people across the world who spend more than 50 percent of their income on food, the effects have been staggering: 250 million people joined the ranks of the hungry in 2008, bringing the total of the world’s “food insecure” to a peak of 1 billion — a number never seen before.

What’s the solution? The last time I visited the Minneapolis Grain Exchange, I asked a handful of wheat brokers what would happen if the U.S. government simply outlawed long-only trading in food commodities for investment banks. Their reaction: laughter. One phone call to a bona-fide hedger like Cargill or Archer Daniels Midland and one secret swap of assets, and a bank’s stake in the futures market is indistinguishable from that of an international wheat buyer. What if the government outlawed all long-only derivative products, I asked? Once again, laughter. Problem solved with another phone call, this time to a trading office in London or Hong Kong; the new food derivative markets have reached supranational proportions, beyond the reach of sovereign law.

Volatility in the food markets has also trashed what might have been a great opportunity for global cooperation. The higher the cost of corn, soy, rice, and wheat, the more the grain producing-nations of the world should cooperate in order to ensure that panicked (and generally poorer) grain-importing nations do not spark ever more dramatic contagions of food inflation and political upheaval. Instead, nervous countries have responded instead with me-first policies, from export bans to grain hoarding to neo-mercantilist land grabs in Africa. And efforts by concerned activists or international agencies to curb grain speculation have gone nowhere. All the while, the index funds continue to prosper, the bankers pocket the profits, and the world’s poor teeter on the brink of starvation.

Okay, Anderson is welcome here in the Jersey man cave again. Not that I watched more than a few minutes (120) of the Royal Wedding Redux on CNN tonight (the dress – omg – the dress was spectacular)…LOL

LOL Whoops- wrong place.
I had a window open meaning to reply on GS, mob rule, the eventual likelihood of riots, etc and I got up for a bit and was tracker-beamed into the Royal Wedding on CNN in the famile room. (Walkin it off now.)

Glencore is the world’s biggest commodities trader,according to Reuters. There’s a decent chance you’ve recently bought something, perhaps many things, that have crossed its trading desks.

It buys and sells much of the wheat, corn, rice, sugar and edible oils that end up on the world’s dinner tables. Its subsidiaries farm an area of 1,042 square miles, the size of Rhode Island, across Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Paraguay. It owns numerous mines around the world, and sells aluminum, copper, zinc and lead to major manufacturers. It also trades fuels, such as coal. Although it drills no oil of its own, it “handles the supply” of 3 percent of the world’s daily oil consumption, according to the company’s website.

As it bet on rising prices, senior traders at the Swiss-based company publicly urged Russia to impose a grain export ban. Moscow acted a few days later, triggering a grain rally. Glencore is the largest trader in Russian wheat, followed by US-based rivals Cargill and Bunge.

So.

At Thursday's debate, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren defended their Medicare for All plan. They faced criticism from several rivals, including Senator Amy Klobuchar, who described it as a "bad idea," and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who claimed the bill shows Sanders and Warren do not "trust the American people."

At the third presidential primary debate in Houston, Texas, senator and 2020 candidate Elizabeth Warren called for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. Warren also spoke about her stance on U.S. trade policy and how "our trade policy in America has been broken for decades."

After being questioned about the crisis in Venezuela, Senator Bernie Sanders defended his vision of democratic socialism. "I agree with what goes on in Canada and in Scandinavia: guaranteeing healthcare to all people as a human right. I believe that the United States should not be the only major country on Earth not to provide paid family and medical le […]

Debate moderator Jorge Ramos of Univision grilled former Vice President Joe Biden over the Obama administration's deportation record. Biden refused to answer whether he did anything to prevent Obama from deporting a record 3 million people.

A U.S. House of Representatives panel on Friday demanded internal emails, detailed financial information and other company records from top executives of Amazon.com Inc., Facebook Inc, Apple Inc, and Alphabet Inc's Google, widening the antitrust probe of Big Tech.

U.S. Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris on Friday asked a government watchdog to look into the Trump administration's decision to launch an antitrust probe into four automakers cooperating with California on tighter greenhouse gas emissions limits that Trump is trying to eliminate.

A lawyer for former FBI official Andrew McCabe pressed U.S. prosecutors on Friday to drop their politically sensitive case against him, citing reports that suggest they may be having trouble securing criminal charges.

Media

from Howl

I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma
by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the
roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the
hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse
O skinny legions run outside O starry
spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is
here O victory forget your underwear we're free
I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-
journey on the highway across America in tears
to the door of my cottage in the Western night

October 7 1955

"a remarkable collection of angelson one stage reading their poetry"
"I think Allen Ginsberg standing up there reading - putting himself on the line - was one of the two bravest things I've ever seen. Remember, it was '55. People had crew cuts, and they looked at you like you were misplaced cannon fodder. The country was being run by Luce publications. It was a dangerous, cold, ugly time, and it was scary. . .
In all our memories no one had been so outspoken in poetry before. We had gone beyond a point of no return. None of us wanted to go back to the grey, chill, militaristic silence, to the intellectual void - to the land without poetry - to the spiritual drabness. We wanted to make it new and we wanted to invent it and the process of it as we went into it. We wanted voice and we wanted vision."
-Michael McClure

Democrats…

Same as goddam fucking forever.
Over and over, in election year after election year, GE and MidTerms both… the Dems start to purr and preen, they stretch luxuriously - at just being TOLD they are going to win [...]
It never fails.
... in February of 2002, looking over the already joyless congressional stragglers willing to be drafted for duty… they barely dreamed, yet, it was even possible (Howard, a different person then, had not arrived to say it could be done)… but one thing was clear, we could not rely on the party to swing it. Could not. You could smell it, they would screw the deal. And I am not talking about Howard and primary issues here. By the end, that was a passing political story. Chuck it on the heap.
[...]
Upshot? The Republicans make it thru. They hold on.